Hi,
this is really an interesting discussion, so some points from a more quiet reader:
I would really hope, that we can get a mixture of voting for new features and getting them paid like in crowd funding. The actual +1 in the forum and the "you can contact us and make a bid" isn't good enough for merging interests and bringing PB to the future.
I'm thinking of a tool like this: maybe everyone can search, if other people need the same feature or if not post a new concrete missing feature, and this could be shown to all logged in users with for example voting
-nice to have, but not willing to pay for
-would pay 50€ for it
-would pay 100€ for it
-would pay 200€ for it
....
As we all are different in our programming style and needs, I would not make a selection for "not interested in this feature", because if we only talk about paying for new features, the only reason
for a decision should be the people needing and paying it
I think there will be a lot of things, where enough people would be willing to pay something for, but that also a lot others don't need.
(If help is needed, I would be willing to program something in PHP for this voting/funding.)
Additionally to crowd paying for interesting features I would be willing to pay a yearly license fee, if there would be a more noticable progression of PB. (You only have to take a look at the big US software company selling its office package, getting worst with every subversion and not listening to its users but billing about 100€ per year for it....)
And to the discussion about PB for beginners or professionals:
I think there are a lot of good things for beginners, but also there are missing some things, making programming easier for beginners or making things needless complicated.
I'm programming self employed for about 25 years in different languages and really love the "Basic" style, but I never was a big memory, pointer or object juggler. Having done a lot of programming in the good old GFA Basic, for example strings could contain NULL Bytes and used with convert functions for a lot more things then only real text. And GFA had the commands Insert and Delete to put elements in an array or delete from an array at a numbered array position with automatic movement of the other elements back or forth. I know, a lot of things could be done with memory or maybe lists or maps, but it is not so simple.
On the other side we have a lot more internet things now than years ago, but here PB still isn't fit for the year 2018 with its "TLS-encrypt every connection"-hype. A lot of things again could be done the hard way using libraries like curl, but for a lot of beginners I think it would be helpful, when everything in the Ftp, Http, Mail and Network libs could be used with TLS.
And taking a look to the data privacy/protection hype of may 2018 for example there could be some simple en/decrypt functions for reading from and writing to files. Again, one can put data in memory, encrypt it and then safe it to disk, but this again for me is not Basic.
Just my cents,
Hoerbie
